The District Railway

The Metropolitan District Railway (1868-1933) was the second of London's Underground railways and
is the basis of today's District Line. It was a railway
for many years troubled by financial difficulties and want
of direction, but day to day control was entrusted to
high-calibre managers who provided a reliable service
against adversity and extended its train service well beyond
its comparatively small network. It took American money and
drive to push through much needed electrification in 1905
and within a few years the District was subsumed into the
London Underground 'combine' and lost much of its own
individuality.

A Tale of Two Books

In 2015 I was asked to write a definitive history of the
District Railway with a view to marking the 150-years
anniversary at the end of 2018. This was not a task
undertaking lightly since comparatively little had been
written about this interesting little railway in comparison
with other lines. More had been witten about the Met's Brill
branch than about the District, so it appeared.

I had some forebodings about this since it did not make
obvious sense why a railway (and in London terms an
important one) had been studiously ignored by the usual
railway authors who had unearthed much useful information
about the rest of the system and published it. A vast tome
had appeared about the Waterloo and City and even the old
Great Northern & City Railway had had a book written about
it. The only book about the District Railway was by Charles
Lee, as part of the Oakwood series, and even that was sixty
years old. I exclude in these observations the various later
line histories written to a formula and where the need for
brevity meant eliminating all but the essentials.

My forebodings were well justified and I discovered for
myself what earlier generations of author presumably
observed, which was that the formal sources of data (many
would call them primary sources but I have reservations
about that term) were, to say the least, a bit thin.
Compared with the Metropolitan Railway's capacious archives
where the general manager's files survive and might be
thought a daunting challenge because of their volume, the
District equivalent is absent. Moreover the District minute
books not only tend to be unyielding but are positively
frustrating. For example topics are enndlessly postponed
with no clear outcome; matters are delegated to committees
that are never referred to again; troublesome correspondence
is referred to at board meetings with no reference to what
the subject is about, let alone what the reply was. Not all
the minute books seem even to have survived and the Ealing &
South Harrow company's books seem to have disappeared.

In order to synthesize any meaningful history it was
necessary to consult a very large number of external sources
in an attempt to piece together a coherant story despite
conflicting records of events and mismatching dates, most
(but not all) of which were eventually resolved. The outcome
is a two volume history of the District Railway, the volume
break located at the point of management change in 1901. By
happy coincidence this coincides with the change of century
and the half way point in the text. The imperative of having
something ready for the District's 150th birthday was (I
suppose) useful in focusing the mind but inevitably
foreshortended the time available for research; there were
many things unearthed for which more investigation was
called for and another year would have been handy.

Reason for These Website Pages

Having said something of the background to the books
covering the District Railway history, and the unavoidable
deadline, I come to the 'what next'. No piece of research is
probably ever 'complete', whatever that means, and it seemed
to me useful to create a channel in which additional
information might be made known and corrections and
amplifications made and where this is all in one place.

To that end I have added a 'District Railway' section to
my website which I have titled: 'The Metropolitan District Railway - Some Historical Footnotes'.
These pages are intended to evolve as new information
becomes available that might be of interest. It is not
intended to cover material already in the books, which
should be regarded as 'background'. Inevitably there will be
some overlap and it is possible that over time new
information might appear here that supersedes odd sections
of the book. In the main it is hoped to introduce new
material, or more detail, where inclusion in the book was
not possible or too detailed for a general historical work.
Moreover the book stops in 1933 but the District's history
continued to march forward.

I will be dividing material by topic but in order to kick
start these pages I will just insert some simple links for
now.